This thread marks a double milestone for Threadinburgh, it is the 300th post since the first in September 2022 and the visit counter just ticked past the 500,000 mark! I'm marking this occasion by finally chalking something off my to-do list that has been there far too long. Perhaps by providence, I recently acquired a little booklet self-described as "a Merry-Ma-Tanzie of Skipping, Hiding, Hopping, Birling, Stotting, Playing and Dancing Rhymes". The Singing Street, to give it its name, was the accompaniment to a 1951 amateur film with the same title. Described by The Scotsman as "a wonderful picture of Edinburgh - as true perhaps as has ever been put on the screen", it turns seventy-five next year. It's all too easy to treat its "astonishingly evocative scenes" as a pure nostalgia trip back to an Edinburgh which has disappeared into living memory, but this was never the intent of the film. It is so much more than just a skip and a hop down memory lane, so let's celebrate it by telling the tale of how and why it came to be and by recognising its importance as a piece of a wider archival work. Once that is out the way shall we step scene-by-scene and song-by-song, back to the streets of 1950s Edinburgh to compare them with the present day.

Brutalist buildings are the Marmite of architecture - passionately loved or loathed - and one in Edinburgh was much in the news yesterday when it was announced that plans had been lodged for the demolition and replacement of Argyle House. But while other news sources make much click capital out of it having briefly appeared in some Netflix police show or another, here at Threadinburgh I prefer to get down to the nitty-gritty of the how, why and what of this much critiqued building. And just what it has to do with the Lyceum Theatre, Dalgety Bay and the Water of Leith Walkway...

Am 20. September 1945 wurde in Friedland das Durchgangslager für Flüchtlinge eröffnet. Hunderttausende kamen zu Fuß und in Zügen. Schon bald reichte der Platz nicht mehr, die Anlage musste vergrößert ...